MinD - Designing for People with Dementia

This time the MinD team met in The Netherlands again, where the team is hosted by three partners, University of Twente, Panton Healthcare Design and Zorggroep Sint Maarten, who are reflecting the interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral nature of the project. The main aim of the visit was to continue to work on the design development to identify the most urgent areas for design intervention and relevant design solutions.

The team worked on mapping existing design products and services as well as design ideas developed by the MinD team against the design themes, which had emerged from the data collection. This allowed to identify 7 ‘Transition areas’ where people with dementia and their carers are most concerned with adapting to change. Under the guidance of colleagues from Panton, the team also developed ‘Personas’ – examples representative of different groups of persons with dementia and carers – which are used to make key issues experienced more tangible.

On Thursday 6 July, hosted by Panton Design, the MinD team held a design symposium and workshop with external experts on dementia to show them the current state of our work and collect ideas, opinions and comments. Prof Kristina Niedderer gave an introduction to the MinD project. This was followed by the keynote of Prof Tischa van der Cammen, from Delft University on design for ageing.

After lunch, Ingeborg Griffeon form Panton Design introduced the Design workshop part of the day. Participants from both healthcare and design were given the opportunity to review and comment on the results of the MinD project so far and to join into the design development activities. The tasks generated lively discussion and great results offering public engagement and contributions to the MinD project as well as knowledge transfer for participating experts and students.